Everybody in New York Already Knows Where We Are
Fewer New York businesses list a website than almost any city I sampled, at 77.8%. The reason owners give me is a good one, and it still costs them the customer they have never met.
“Everybody who needs us already knows where we are.”
He wasn’t bragging when he said it. Nineteen years on the same corner, a line out the door at noon, and a landlord who still likes him.
I hear some version of that sentence in New York more than in any city I work in.
And the first thing I owe him is this: he’s mostly right.
Why the line lands
On a block like his, the sidewalk does the selling.
Regulars bring their kids in. A neighbor tells the new tenant upstairs where to go for a key cut, and no homepage on earth has ever done that job as well as a guy behind a counter does it in four seconds.
A butcher told me once that his best advertising was the smell of the place at nine in the morning, and he was so obviously correct about it that I never did send him a proposal.
I’ve talked owners out of hiring me over less than that. If your day is full and the rent is covered by people who walk past, a website is not the most interesting thing you could buy this year.
But is the day full because the whole neighborhood has decided about you, or because the people who decided years ago are the only ones who ever got the chance to?
Plenty of the city agrees with him, too. 77.8% of the businesses I sampled in New York City list a website, 20th of 24 cities, against the 83% I get across every business in the sample.
So it isn’t one stubborn man on one corner. It’s a way of thinking, and it belongs to the one city on my list where the sidewalk really does carry some of the load.
Now let me take it apart.
The customer you’re picturing isn’t the one you’re missing
When you say everybody already knows, you’re thinking about a person who already knows.
She’s fine, and she’ll be in on Thursday exactly the way she was in on Thursday last year, whatever anybody decides about a website.
The woman I’m thinking about signed a lease six weeks ago and has been eating badly ever since.
She’s standing on a different block with her phone out, and your name is one of four on the screen. Which of the four gets the call?
She isn’t being disloyal to you. She has no idea you exist, and the four names on her screen all have an equal claim on the next twenty minutes of her evening.
Nobody in that moment is walking past your window. Your nineteen years are worth nothing at all to her, because she has no way of finding out they happened.
What “has a website” is even counting
My own figure is generous, and I’d rather say so than let you lean on it.
Both of those still count as having a website in my data, because a listing that points somewhere is all my crawler can see from the outside. Both of them fail the woman with four names on her screen.
A dead link on your Google listing, the panel of hours and stars that comes up when someone searches your name, is worse than no link at all. No link reads as a shrug. A dead link reads as closed.
So the number I gave you a minute ago is friendlier than the truth, everywhere I audit, and the distance between listing something and having something is bigger than anything I can count from the outside.
When did you last tap that button yourself, from your own phone, standing outside your own door?
The second version of the line
“I’ve got a Facebook page. That’s my website.”
I get that one almost as often, and usually from the owners with the best photographs.
Your page lives in a building someone else owns, though, and I’ve watched that landlord change the locks more than once since I started doing this. Reach, layout, what a stranger sees first, none of it is your decision, and an account another company administers is an advertising channel rather than an address you can give people.
The stars have already done the hard part
One thing about this city gets me every time I pull the numbers.
On stars, New York comes 4th of the 24 cities I sampled, 90.7% of the businesses here carrying at least one Google review under their name.
Getting a customer to leave stars takes nerve, repetition, and a fair amount of standing there while she types with her thumbs. Buying a website takes an afternoon and a decision, which is why it bothers me that the awkward job is the one already finished around here.
Software companies have it backwards. They own the websites and almost none of them have ever asked a customer for a review, which is the harder half to go back and fix.
And the two jobs don’t swap places. I rebuilt a page in Washington one winter and the star rating never moved an inch, because a redesign has never once persuaded a customer to write anything.
So the city has done the hard part and then stopped one tap short of the easy part.
The panel with those stars in it has a website button sitting right on it. Where does yours send her?
What the corner can’t do
Your corner can’t answer at eleven at night, when she’s deciding what to do about tomorrow.
It can’t tell her what you charge, whether you take her insurance, whether you’re open Sunday, or whether the thing she needs is even something you do.
Most of the questions that decide whether she calls are the ones nobody wants to ask a stranger over the phone, and a page that answers them while you sleep costs you one afternoon and then keeps answering. It doesn’t have to be a big page, either. The quickest small business sites in this city got that way by leaving things off on purpose.
So who answers those for her on a Sunday, while you’re closed and she’s deciding about Monday?
And your corner belongs to your landlord. The listing belongs to Google. A website is the only part of this you own outright, which is worth more in a city where the rent decides everything.
When someone here does decide to get one, that’s the work I do. If you’ve never bought one before, mine sits on a single page and you can read the whole thing without talking to me.
Already own one? Then the first job isn’t a rebuild. The softest check in this whole city costs nothing to put right, and it’s where I’d start on a site that already exists.
Who this wasn’t written for
Not the man on the corner with nineteen years and a line at noon. He was right, and I told him so before I left.
Not the plumber whose entire year arrives from a super with a burst pipe at two in the morning, who has never once been picked off a screen and never will be.
Not the shop that’s fed the same block for forty years and would sooner stop growing than hire another pair of hands.
I wrote it for the ones who read all of that and quietly hoped they counted.
You know which one you are. So does the woman on the other block, holding four names and about to pick one.
